The reverse acquisition attack: Buying the bitcoin POW to DPOS hardfork

[xeroc]

It looks like a hostile takeover.

Yeah .. but I like it ...

let me read it again more carefully

[fluxer555]

Holy shit.

[luckybit]

It looks like a hostile takeover.

[nomoreheroes7]

I couldn't bring myself to read all of that...but what I did read sounds incredible.

You have a keen mind, Rune.  +5%

[Rune]

Turns out the attack isn't possible. The assumption that miners can always mine empty blocks that the main chain has to accept is mistaken. Developers would release a full node update in response that rejects empty blocks based on some criteria of  and there would be a network partition if this was ever attempted.

The good news is that it means no one can perform this attack, so we won't be at risk by some competitor or mining pool creating a bitcoin 2.0 blockchain that destroys us. Unfortunately this also means that bitcoin will probably never be able to upgrade its consensus algorithm away from POW, and will have to become irrelevant eventually, which I think is a shame.